Gender is not a fact about persons that we must take as fixed and essential (and then build our social institutions around that fact). Gender, for humans, is socially constructed; an externally imposed hierarchy: male or female. The human personality is a spectrum – and allows us to more or less conform to the gender norms associated with our gender, or not.

But, we do not need gender. We would be better off without it. Gender as a hierarchy with two positions operates to naturalize and perpetuate the subordination of female people to male people, and constrains the development of individuals of both sexes. And reconceiving of gender as an identity spectrum represents no improvement!

Many years ago when gmail was just launched in beta, my first email was the welcome email from Google. Over time I had an inbox in the thousands. In the last few years I tried to get to 0 again, but failed. Now I have learned about GTD and also a thing our two from The Behavioral Science Guys, so I decided to actually track my, uhm, progress publicly.

PS: This is done by having a Google Script write to a Google Spreadsheet that generates a public Google Spreadsheet Chart. Here is the code:

Customer satisfaction research might be a waste of time if you only try to find the areas you want to improve for existing customers: they are still customers! You can probably be more effective in improving the aspects that cause existing customers to go elsewhere – or, even more importantly, not even come to you!

Video is a growing and popular medium. But audio is, and will remain, very important, because: when watching video, one can not do anything other than stationary routine tasks that do not require constant visual attention and/or communication (like eating a meal). With audio, one has much more freedom. But when the audio contains human voice(s), one is limited to semi-routine tasks (like driving a car) that exclude communication, except, some light (non-complex) tactile communication like typing a simple email.

We have many ways to ingest music, but we need more services that allow one to stream non-music audio. We lost the #ConversationsNetwork (thanks @DougKaye1 for the many years of great curated content), but the internet still needs a new service that allows one to choose curated or categorized non-music audio (including functionalities to track history, so we do not have duplicates in the users playlist).

Podcasts are a great temporary solution, but #podcasts filter per producer (or, sometimes, per curator), not per episode. And they are still not easy to manage in a multi-device environment (think: resume and suggest, like @Netflix).

I was on the phone. I am in love. I miss her. I wanted to crawl through the wire and be with her.

I explained that one day – sooner than we might think – it will be possible. Our body (and even our mental state) is basically just energy. We can already measure a lot of the state of energy at the subatomic level; just not yet at the large scale needed for instantly “scanning” the state of the energy of a human being. And, since we are already making progress with 3D printing, just like that we can store that state of our body and, eventually, be able to recreate that elsewhere on demand.

For now I will have to miss my girl, but for how long? What are your ideas?

The following article explains that studying-results can be significantly improved not only by the brain-based methods I am a strong proponent for, but also by actual retention qualifiers.

Using Brain Scans to Predict Future Test Performance

Will a brain scan reveal how well you’ve studied for a big test? Researchers at Sandia National Laboratory have demonstrated that the brain’s electrical activity, detectable via electroencephalogram (EEG), predicts how well studied material has been incorporated into memory, and, thus, how well subjects performed on memory tests.

The researchers asked 23 people to attempt to memorize a list of words while undergoing brain scanning. The average subject recalled 45% of the words on the list. The EEG data correctly predicted which five of the 23 subjects would beat the competition, remembering 72% of the words on average.

“If you had someone learning new material and you were recording the EEG, you might be able to tell them, ‘You’re going to forget this, you should study this again,’ or tell them, ‘OK, you got it and go on to the next thing,’ ” chief researcher Laura Matzen said in a statement.

Matzen presented her findings at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference in Chicago. This second phase of research will determine the effectiveness of various types of research and training methods.

I strongly urge all Americans to vote strategically. Don’t vote Republican or Democrat. Polling proves most Americans (and world citizens) do not agree with the actual decisions they actually make. Vote Libertarian.

Regarding the new (European) law about cookies on websites I have this to say: while I am pro transparency, I believe that one should not force transparency. In order to deal with the problem of having to opt-in users I suggest you write a good disclaimer and wait until browsers solve the cookie opt-in problem by for example keeping a list of pre-authorized sites (like Google Analytics) or by subscribing to public or paid white/black lists that are auto-updated in the browser. This should not be a human choice on every site, but a general “setting” and/or trusting an intermediary source to help users make that decision in an automated way.